Digital cameras that can capture digital images are widely spread around the world. These images can be transferred to a computer where they can either be stored for future retrieval or be sent as an attachment to an email. The receiver of the email can open the attachment and view the images in a dedicated application program. Such email could also be sent via a mobile phone containing or being connected to a modem.
It is a problem that the receiver of the digital image must perform any type of wanted processing of the digital image manually. If the digital image represents a picture, the receiver must open the picture in a software application where he can print or store the picture. If the digital image represents hand written text the receiver may want to open the image in a handwriting recognition software application that converts the image in to digital characters. Then the user may want to convert the characters into a file format that is known to a certain software word processing application.
Another problem is that the digital image may contain several objects that the user wants to perform various actions on. One object may contain typed or hand written text that needs to be interpreted by certain software that transforms it into digital characters. Another object may represent a digital picture that should be compressed or transformed into another picture file format. Known software applications are not precise in separating a digital image into objects like texts, pictures or sketches and are thus not suitable for automatically carry out different services for different objects contained in a digital image.
Yet another problem is that the sender of the digital image needs to go through a number of steps of fundamentally different nature e.g. capture the image by a digital camera, transmit it to a mobile phone or computer, start an email application program, insert the digital image in to an email, enter or look up the wanted email addresses of the receivers and then send the email.